Dharma Curious (he/him) @ dharmacurious @slrpnk.net

Same great Dharma, new SolarPunk packaging!

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1 yr. ago

I like to imagine this is about president Garfield, and it makes it so, so much better

When I was about 14 I had a friend whose mom caught him masturbating. She duct taped oven mitts to his hands every night before bed for a week until Sunday, when she took him to their priest. The priest told her, basically, she was crazy. Masturbation is a sin, yada yada Catholic line, but that she could not duct tape her child's hands at night, and because it was a counseling session and not a confessional, he would be required to report her if it continued.

Dude was so fucking messed up, though. Kept up with him on Facebook for a while after j moved, and he ended up doing a lot of SI and then in his mid twenties went full goth and got a shit ton of piercings and tattoos to cover the scars.

I am not a gamer. I enjoyed fallout 4 a lot, though, and kept hearing all this hype for New Vegas. Legit bought that game thinking it was new. Lmao

What I've played has been good, though

Is that a fucking movie trailer? Wtaf

Woofr does streaming now? They've made s big transition, back in my day it was a fetish hookup app for furries

Yeah, I'm in this boat. Is he using exactly body temp water somehow?

Yeah, online, full time. And I'm in Tennessee, near Knoxville. Raleigh is closeish, day trip distance

Undergrad right now. I'd be willing to lose some credits if I could go religious studies, or even a good philosophy program. But none I've found seemed to be worth it

The point wasn't that I wanted the info, friend. The point was to demonstrate how shitty a metric X USD is.

... I can only imagine her fingernail scratched the shit of you. Did that not hurt? Even short nails would hurt me. My schnozz is sensitive. Lol

That's what I wanted to get my degree in, but for a couple of different reasons, I need to be able to go online, not in person, and couldn't find a program at an online school that looked decent. Very willing to change schools for that if you know of anything! Religious studies is the dream.

You're on red note? I never really used tiktok, just stuck with shorts, but I've been considering checking out RN just for the interaction with Chinese folks. Sounds interesting. Do you reccomend?

Absolutely not a China stan or anything. I'm pretty solidly against any government that allows the existence of billionaires. But judging a system by the amount of us dollars people live off of is a pretty metric. I have 100 monies, does that buy me a condo or a condom? I have 100 million monies, can I afford to eat tonight? Depends on the cost of living, the inflation rate, so many factors.

What percentage of their populace is homeless, has access to clean water, has access to the Internet? Or if you're dead set on using the amount of people living off a set amount of dollars, at least provide some info on what 10usd gets you in China, and if there's a big difference depending on geography?

Again, not a China stan, I think their censorship is shitty, I think their about as socialist as Nebraska, and that the Chinese government has hurt the socialist movement pretty severely by leaning into capitalism and abandoning any truly socialist ideals in exchange for international strength. In fairness, I'm also not a fan of the US. Just so you understand my position here. I'm not jumping to the defense of either, they certainly don't need my help.

Because they did some stuff a while back with closed source code, and it scared me off. I'm not the most tech literate person, so I mainly base my stuff off what the open source nerds tell me to do. With a password manager in particular I wanted to be on something open source, because I don't trust big corpos not to backdoor into my shit, especially since I don't really understand how it works and don't know how to keep myself safe other than listening to people who know more than I do. So when the open source folks started saying get off bitwarden, I did, because I saw what happened with other password managers that had leaks and hacks. Plus, I wanted a vpn anyway (and now actually need one if I want to watch porn in my Christofascist state), and they only charge me like 20 bucks for everything.

Warning: religion, philosophy, nondualism and metaphysics are my trains. I wrote you a thesis before realizing what I had done. You're not going to hurt my feelings if you don't read the freaking book I just wrote. Lmao. Sowwy

I'm pretty new to TEC, to be honest. Grew up Baptist, but that wasn't a good fit for various reasons, and sort of just did my own thing for a long time. Ended up finding the Episcopals when I decided I wanted to try going to church again. Helluva difference, being in a liturgical tradition, and I like it a lot.

Re: Buddhism V advaita:

So, it's not so much about what one fills that the other lacks as it is about... Perspective? If multiple groups are all saying something similar, but with different focuses, intentions, inflections, verbage, et cetera, I think it's interesting to examine both, find their commonalities and differences, and try to understand the underlying message. Buddhism speaks of emptiness, Advaita of illusion. While Buddhism tells us there is no self, advaita says there is no self except the self, the singular Brahman. I'll be honest in that I am really new to Buddhism, and most of my advaita comes from Vivekananda and Ramakrishna and others labeled neoadvaita, but there is a lot of traditionalist thought and teaching in there, too. But I think, ultimately, they're saying very similar, if not the same, things, and that by allowing yourself to float a bit between them you get to understand them a bit more. Kind of like how if you learn Italian and Spanish and Romanian you might have a much easier time understanding some old Latin texts. **

Re: Kashmiri Shaivism:

If you're at all interested in nondualism you've got to check out Kashmiri Shaivism! Very cool tradition. It's a nondualism tradition, but with Shiva as the focus instead of Brahman. It's independent of Advaita, and IIRC significantly older. Like, potentially Indus Valley civilization old. Prevedic old. Though, obvious any living tradition has changed in that amount of time. There are several really good YouTubers that do advaita info (and if you're anywhere near NC then Swami Sarvapriyananda from the Vedanta Society of NYC is going to be in Raleigh in March, and I'm hopefully going to be there), but there's less info on Kashmiri Shaivism. There's the Kauai's Hindu Monastery also called Himalayan Academy, but I don't remember if they're specifically Kashmiri or not, but I do think they're ultimately nondualist, or qualified nondualists. I'll look around and find some resources if you're interested.

And yeah, Jainism is fascinating! Though so strict. I can't imagine being brought up in that tradition. I have Catholic Guilt by association, and I'm not even Catholic. Lol. I can't imagine what the idea of that strict an understanding of Karma would do to my psyche! Lmao

And I have actually just recently begun reading about Sikhism again! I love their ideas around universality of religions.

Are you at all familiar with Meister Eckhart? Turns out, there's a Christian nondualist tradition!

Sufism is another really interesting entry point into Abrahamic nondualism, too. Though it's a minority viewpoint even within Sufism, a minority trend in Islam, from what I understand. If you're interested in that Tawhid is a good keyword for search and Let's Talk Religion has an excellent video (or several) on Islamic nondualists and mysticism

I'm gonna stop writing there, because this is already a wall of text. Sorry!

**

I lied. Bit more on what I was saying about Buddhism and Advaita. I look at religion the same way I look at language. You have language families that share a common ancestor proto language, and we can see that with philosophical thought as well. Hell, it's often along the same lines. Indo-european languages are often spoken by groups of people that also had similar religious thought. There are deep similarities between Greek and Roman paganism and the Vedic gods, for instance, as well as with Norse paganism.

Above language families you have the more speculative language phylum, and so on it goes. I think that, ultimately, if you trace the root of a word back far enough, you often find it is present in some form in a proto language shared by seemingly disparate languages, and then working forward again you can find all of these cognates in other languages, and how this simple word in proto Germanic, or PIE is now present, but significantly different, in millions of people's lives.

I apply that same thinking to religion. We see similar concepts, myths, stories crop up in areas that, on the surface, have completely different religious structures. Hinduism and Judaism appear to be completely different, but Hinduism and Zoroastrianism influenced each other to a considerable degree (they even call each other's gods demons and demons gods. Deva/Deava, Asura/Ahura.). Zoroastrianism in turn influenced the crap out of the region, and that includes ancient yahwism and Judaism. There are parts of Leviticus that are almost identical to Zoroastrian texts. Judaism, and in turn Christianity, were also heavily influenced by Hellenistic Greek traditions (sometimes positively, by adopting things, sometimes negatively by making their rejection of them a staple of their faith). Nothing exists in a vacuum (on earth anyway. Lol), and there's so much influence on everything that, much like with language, there exists a sort of continuum of belief. Sure, there are definitely still languages, we need that mutual intelligibility to communicate, but from a really broad historical view, they're all basically connected. Isolates notwithstanding.

Jesus, I am so sorry for how long this comment is.

Motherfucker! I just switched to proton from bitwarden a couple months ago.

Where do I go from here? I've got their family plan thing for vpn and password manager. Help me find something else?

I mean, you control it, and effort and exhaustion don't exist. Go ride a dinosaur, or schtupp your secret crush

That's interesting! I have dachshunds, and didn't know that. I can't wait to tell them while I give them scritches

Have you tried lucid dreaming? It's fairly simple to get into. A lucidity check throughout the day that gives you something to check for in dreams. Mine is placing my fingertips over my nostrils and breathing in. If I can't breathe, I'm awake, if I can, I'm asleep. Once you get into the habit of doing it you'll start doing it in your dreams, and as soon as you realize you're asleep you can take control. Just don't close your eyes or look in mirrors.

Mine were either falling from great heights, riding in a car and driving off a bridge, getting crushed in a collapsing tunnel (lots of bridges and underwater tunnels where I grew up), or full blown hardcore pornographic dreams that involved the weirdest shit imaginable that made me question my sanity when I woke up.

12 is a super awkward age. Lmao